wherein i try to talk about a show and sort of go off rails

[sigmaleph]

The Good Place is a show that is clearly *about* philosophy in a way very little television is (or at least, television I've been exposed to). Which makes it all the more frustrating when the show is just... terrible. at analysing philosophical questions.

The comparison that comes to mind is that it's to philosophy what science fiction is to actual science, except, well... that's kind of awfully arrogant of me isn't it. I am not a scientist but I was a science student for a while. I typically have reason to be confident when I call out some bit of technobabble as making no sense whatsoever, and I have the backing of the scientific establishment behind me.

But like, me calling out Chidi for not being a consequentialist or whatever that nonsense was about free will vs determinism for not even mentioning compatibilism? Lots of real actual philosophers think consequentialism and compatibilism are wrong. I am not even an amateur philosophy student, just some girl who spends too much time on the internet, who the heck cares what I think

and yet compatibilism is the obviously correct answer to the philosophical question of determinism vs free will. like being 100% honest I'm not entertaining much reasonable doubt about this. I have the sense that I *should be* less confident that I've got this question right when clearly lots of very smart people spent longer than I've been alive thinking about this and came to different conclusions, but I'm not.

that sure sounds like it makes me arrogant, which is interesting because I tend to be a very epistemically anxious person (also an anxious person in general). why am i not on this, of all things?

anyway yeah don't watch The Good Place for philosophical instruction, and don't watch sci-fi to learn science.

Comments

[unknought]

There's a model of philosophical disagreement which has become compelling to me recently, which I don't fully endorse:

We don't come to philosophical positions by pure logic alone, but by thinking about our intuitions about the world and trying to fit them into a coherent picture of the thing we're trying to understand. No matter how we do this some of the conclusions we reach are going to be counterintuitive; we're going to need to bite some bullets to get anywhere. But which intuitions we start with and which counterintuitive claims we're willing to accept is something that varies a fair amount from person to person. Philosophical analysis can help us expand on a particular viewpoint and give a detailed and precise picture of the world based on that intuition, but it can't really resolve differences between people coming from different starting points. So you can get to a point where you can be pretty confident that no further philosophical argument could convince you to change your mind while still knowing a lot less about the topic than some philosopher with a different view.

But why should you trust your own intuitions? I think the only answer I can give here is that it's not really possible to do otherwise. No matter what approach or meta-approach you take to the problem, you're ultimately starting from a place of "What makes sense to me?" and you can't get away from that. In Bayesian terms: Two rational Bayesian predictors with very different priors can reach different conclusions from the same evidence, but it doesn't ever become rational for either predictor to change their priors in response to the disagreement.

Like I said I don't completely endorse this model, but for me it's given an explanation for how I can be justifiably confident in a philosophical position even while acknowledging that there is no consensus among people who understand the issue much better than I do.